UN Climate Talk Deal Unlikely
Politico reports:
For eight years, the world waited for a U.S. president to help stop global warming and save the planet.
So far, Barack Obama hasn't lived up to the job.
Cap-and-trade legislation Obama promised two years ago on the campaign trail is dead and buried, and his administration is attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions and cover billions of dollars in pledges without majority support in Congress.
Internationally, heading into the U.N.-led climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, next week, prospects for a multitrillion-dollar transocean carbon market are in tatters and a new binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol remains years away.
Obama won't be going to Mexico for the conference that starts Nov. 29, and neither will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or many of the other members of Congress who went to ice-cold Copenhagen for last year's U.N. negotiations.
The State Department's Todd Stern will be the face of the Obama administration during the two-week meeting that starts Nov. 29. His job is to sell Plan B: A suite of Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations and billions of dollars in renewable energy stimulus bill spending that the White House says would curb domestic emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
“People respect that the president wants to do this," Stern told reporters last week after preliminary negotiations in Arlington, Va. "It’s night and day as compared to the previous administration. But having said that, no question we’d have been in a markedly stronger position had we gotten our domestic legislation done.”
The outsize expectations for Obama on climate change came in no small part because of how George W. Bush handled the climate issue. For eight years, Bush battled Democrats, environmentalists and much of the rest of the world by resisting calls to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
On the international stage, foreign diplomats often tagged the United States as an enemy. At a 2007 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, officials from Europe, South Africa and Papua New Guinea blasted Bush officials and prompted the entire conference to boo them. Former Vice President Al Gore pleaded with negotiators to "save a large, open blank space" for the next president.
But by the much-anticipated Copenhagen conference in December, Obama still didn't have a climate law in hand, forcing him and 120 other leaders to skirt the sort of treaty deal many had envisioned when he was sworn into office.
"The expectations for Copenhagen were unrealistic," U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said last week. "It's not possible to come to one agreement that's going to magically solve every problem that we have on climate change, which was, unfortunately, the expectation that was up there in the air."Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), co-author of several unsuccessful cap-and-trade bills over the past decade, suggested an under-the-radar approach could yield results.
"Perhaps what Copenhagen has contributed to this moment, pre-Cancun, is low expectations," Lieberman said. "As a result, we may be surprised by what happens."
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